The World's Best Dividend Portfolio

In June, I invested my money equally in a selection of 10 high-yield dividend stocks. Those names offer triple the yield of the average S&P 500 stock. You can read all the details here. Now let's check out the results so far.

Our total portfolio performance moved from -1.9% last week to -3.2% this week, and now we're just even with the S&P, albeit with much less volatility in the interim. But I'm confident in the long-run nature of this portfolio, and I fully expect it to outperform. Even if our capital goes down in the interim, we'll still see dividends while we wait. We continue to have six stocks outperforming the index.

The European situation continues to fester, with Eurocrats failing to do anything much yet to fix their morass. I'm not very optimistic about the situation at all, and if we should see a general market downturn, I'll be glad to be in dividend stocks, which should see lower downside volatility. We should still see good performance from names such as Annaly, which thrives in a low-rate environment.

As I mentioned last week, because of the Fool's trading restrictions, I have yet to add to my Annaly position. And I've decided to up my reinvestment in Annaly to $170. While not all the news has been good from the mortgage REIT sector, Annaly still looks poised to pump out solid dividends.

If you're looking for other dividend ideas, I just wrote another article on a great one called "The Dividend-Paying 2-Bagger." It has a meaty dividend and could be a double besides. You can read all the details, including why I decided to buy it for my own portfolio (not the World's Best Portfolio yet).

Dividends and other announcements Going into the holiday season the news has been pretty light. We have these bits of dividend news:

Dividend news:

Vodafone announced a special dividend of 4 pence on top of its 3.05 pence interim payout. The stock traded ex-div on Nov. 16, and the money will be paid out on Feb. 3. In dollars, the total payout comes to about $1.12 per U.S. share at current exchange rates.

Southern went ex-div on Nov. 7 and distributed $0.4725 per share on Dec. 6.

Exelon went ex-div on Nov. 15 and paid out $0.525 per share on Dec. 9.

Frontier went ex-div on Dec. 7 and pays out $0.1875 per share on Dec. 29.

Philip Morris trades ex-div on Dec. 20 and pays out $0.77 a share on Jan. 10.

All that, of course, means more money coming into our pockets shortly.

It's fun to sit back and get paid, and with the market volatility, we might have a good chance to reinvest those dividends at good prices. Europe continues to be an absolute mess, and continued bad news will likely have stocks plunging again, and if they do, I'll be inclined to pick more shares up.

Foolish bottom line I've been a fan of big dividends for a while, and I think this portfolio will outperform the market over time through the power of dividends. As I promised in the original article, I'll be holding these stocks for at least a year and will continue to track the portfolio over the course of the year, including news on these companies.

At the time this
article was published Jim Royal, Ph.D., owns shares of the 10 portfolio stocks mentioned in the table. The Motley Fool owns shares of Seaspan, Brookfield Infrastructure, Annaly, Plum Creek, and Philip Morris. The Fool owns shares of and has created a covered strangle position on Plum Creek. Motley Fool newsletter services have recommended buying shares of Exelon, National Grid, Philip Morris, Vodafone, Southern, and Brookfield Infrastructure, as well as writing a covered straddle position in Seaspan and a covered strangle position in Exelon. Try any of our Foolish newsletter services free for 30 days. We Fools may not all hold the same opinions, but we all believe that considering a diverse range of insights makes us better investors. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.